DC By the Book

Excerpt: Martin noticed for the first time how much the garden had come to resemble the one behind the Senator's house back in Washington. He'd forgotten so much from those days, but he did remember the winding brick path and the cozy, pale-yellow carriage house that the three of them had shared. The cottage at the back of the Senator's property had always seemed to him as if it belonged in one of those fairy tales set deep in the middle of an enchanted forest, its low-ceilinged grace, its exposed beams, the pale-pink paint that covered every interior surface; how back there with his sister and their father - when their father wasn't off seeing to the Senator - it always seemed like the Housewrights had been sent away and abandoned on some wonder-filled and magical island.

Excerpt: (Good gracious: that little yellow house! How tiny it must have been, there behind the Senator’s mansion, but I somehow never imagined it that way. I remember it as huge.) The cottage sat at the end of a short spur off the main path bisecting the rear gardens. Two rooms downstairs where the stalls had been for the horses and storage for a carriage or two, and two tiny rooms upstairs, where the draymen had their quarters. (For the life of me, I can’t recall my father telling me if the house had already been converted when he first came to work for the Senator.) Two mullioned windows on the front. Four over four. Dormers above. Many guests to the Senator’s garden parties must have imagined it a toy house of some kind – like some sort of outrageous lawn ornament or perhaps a play fort for the Hunnicutt boy.

Excerpt: As it happened, Father's new employer's requirements were much less taxing than those at the house my grandfather ran. The old gentleman operated from a smaller townhouse just northwest of Dupont Circle, in an area that had begun to be populated by the embassies of minor and obscure nations.

Excerpt: Back then, when I was that young girl stealing around after her father, times for many Americans were good. It was the period some now refer to as the Roaring Twenties, and when Congress would recess, on many days the parlor of the Georgetown house would be filled with the Senator’s colleagues and their cronies and hangers-on. The Senator’s house became something of a clubhouse for a certain influential set in our nation’s capital.

Excerpt: When we have our own garden, I would tell him, I would like a white wrought-iron trellis for roses, just like the one at the embassy on Mass. Ave.